admin
JAKARTA — Warning alarms in AirAsia flight QZ8501 were “screaming” as the pilots desperately tried to stabilise the plane just before it plunged into the Java Sea last month, a crash investigator said yesterday. The noise of several alarms — including one that indicated the plane was stalling — can be heard going off in recordings from the black box in the Airbus A320-200’s cockpit, the investigator told AFP, requesting anonymity.
“The warning alarms, we can say, were screaming, while in the background they (the pilot and co-pilot) were busy trying to recover,” the investigator said, adding the warnings were going off “for some time”.
The investigator, from Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC), added that the pilots’ voices were drowned out by the sound of the alarms.
The revelation came a day after Indonesian Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan said that the plane had climbed abnormally fast before stalling and plunging into the sea, as it flew on December 28 in stormy weather from Indonesia’s Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board.
“In the final minutes, the plane climbed at a speed which was beyond normal,” the minister told reporters.
So far, just 53 bodies have been recovered following the AirAsia crash.
The two black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder — were recovered last week after a lengthy search, and investigators are examining them.
Investigators have listened to the data from the cockpit voice recorder, and are also looking at a wealth of information from the flight data recorder, which monitors every major part of the plane.
All but seven of those on board the flight were Indonesian. The foreign nationals were from South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Britain and France. — AFP.
Online Reporter